


a thousand mornings

by wreathe



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Grief/Mourning, Kuroken if you squint, Kuroo Tetsurou is a Good Friend, M/M, heaps of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:16:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28650408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathe/pseuds/wreathe
Summary: What they had then Akaashi can never get back.One more day,he pleads,just one.One last morning. He’ll never ask for anything else.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	a thousand mornings

It’s spring. The cherry blossoms have begun to bloom, vestiges of winter fading away with each passing day.

Akaashi does not care. He ambles along the campus grounds mindlessly, trusting muscle memory to guide him to his classes without him having to think too much of it. There’s all sorts of noise around him but all of it feels muted, just like the rest of the world feels muted. Colors, voices, scents, textures—all of it.

On his way to one of the buildings the loud yet hollow sound of something—a _volleyball_ —hitting the gymnasium floors tens of meters away somehow manages to penetrate his dull thoughts, due in no small part to years of instinct and training. All the memories he’s desperately been trying to keep at bay rush in before he can stop them and for a moment, he feels like exploding. Akaashi pauses in the middle of campus and it’s a long while before he can recover enough to get to class. 

It’s spring—the first Akaashi will spend without Bokuto in years.

* * *

“How are you?”

It’s a three-word question everyone’s been throwing around for months. Akaashi supposes that it’s better that someone cares, at the very least, and that they recognize his loss and how much Bokuto had meant to him. There’s a certain sense of comfort in knowing that he’s important enough for people to ask after him, especially in the wake of his loss. 

“Fine.” It’s the only answer he’s been able to muster since last summer because anything else is _too much_. Any more and he won’t be able to restrain himself, and he doesn’t want people to know, nor does he want to waste their time. The world has moved on without him, and in his grief he made his bed and now has to lie in it.

The day before Kuroo had messaged him out of the blue and invited him to lunch. Kuroo goes to another university, one that isn’t too far from where Akaashi goes, and so making time and meeting with him is easy.

Or, it should have been. Akaashi’d spent hours trying to decide whether or not to meet with his friend—his and Bokuto’s friend—and it’s only in the middle of another sleepless night that he’d managed to send a reply.

Now Kuroo is in front of him, asking him all these questions that makes Akaashi feel like he’s drowning, because the world truly has moved on but time has all but stopped for him. Everyone around them is utterly normal but Akaashi is still grieving. It isn’t that he hasn’t tried to move on, because he has—it’s just that everything is still so incredibly painful, like it hasn’t been months since he lost Bokuto.

“You have Kenma,” he blurts out while his friend is speaking, and they descend into an awkward silence that has him feeling guilty about saying anything at all.

It’s a while before Kuroo responds.

“Yeah,” he says. Akaashi stares and it’s almost strange how uncomfortable Kuroo, who’s normally as confident as Bokuto is—was—looks across him, like a hare caught in a trap.

“If you ever need anything—”

“I’m alright,” Akaashi answers, if a little too antagonistic, and then, realizing that Kuroo had only meant well, adds, “ _thanks_.”

* * *

_They are roommates. It’s something that just_ is _; something that doesn’t have to be asked._

_He and Bokuto move into a two-bedroom apartment during Akaashi’s first year in university, and it takes them almost three months before they ultimately succumb to their feelings for each other, Bokuto all but moving into his room, and Bokuto’s room turning into a storage area; a guest room of sorts._

_Akaashi likes sleeping with him. He can’t deny that the feeling is nice and that he sleeps better with him around, and he knows Bokuto feels the same._

_“You’re pretty warm, Kei,” Bokuto says, pulling Akaashi closer. Even without looking he can see the grin on Bokuto’s face._

_He smiles and says nothing but does, however, shift his head a little so he can press a quick kiss goodnight against Bokuto’s lips. After this he simply lays against Bokuto’s chest, and he can hear his boyfriend’s heartbeat against his ear and lets the rhythmic sound lull him to sleep. It’s one of the many things he’ll never get tired of._

Akaashi wakes with a heave, clutching his chest as a searing pain cuts right through him. He lays in bed with his eyes peeled open the entire night, afraid that sleep would bring with it another memory that will leave him not only gasping for air, but in immense physical and emotional pain.

* * *

He had received the news on a Monday. That is exactly when time stops for him, the seconds, minutes, and hours completely coming to a standstill. Akaashi’s world has stayed that way ever since. 

_A freak accident involving the—train cars in the Zurich-Geneva train line—Switzerland Monday, taking the—six Japanese citizens. Bokuto Koutarou, star volleyball player—_

It had taken all of two days for Bokuto to arrive back in Japan, and another two for the funeral preparations to be finalized. And after the funeral, one of Bokuto’s sisters had approached him and requested if he could be the one to fix Bokuto’s belongings from the apartment they shared instead, reason being that he always knew Bokuto best. Akaashi had managed a curt nod, and said that he’d have everything ready in a couple days’ time.

The first night he could barely enter Bokuto’s room and take what little that was there. The second night he could barely touch Bokuto’s clothes in the dresser of their room, and he’d fallen asleep on the floor in tears simply hugging one of Bokuto’s jerseys that’d smelled so much like _him_ , grieving the fact that he was gone, just like that.

A jersey and the shirt Bokuto had worn the night they first slept together were the only things Akaashi had kept.

Three days later, Bokuto’s sister came, and Akaashi had watched from the window as her car drove away, trying to ignore the fact that his heart was breaking hopelessly in half.

* * *

Every day grief comes for Akaashi, dragging its claws along everything in its path.

The last stage of grief is acceptance; Akaashi knows this.

The second is anger. It comes before bargaining and depression, which Akaashi thinks is ridiculous.

He will always be mad. Angry. Bitter and enraged that it had to be _Bokuto_ , of all people, and even when acceptance comes he will still remain angry.

It’s unfair, Akaashi thinks, for someone so full of life to have been taken away so prematurely; someone who had decades ahead of him. Only months and Bokuto would be graduating, and he’d promised Akaashi he’d spend all of it with no one else. It’s an entire lifetime together so tragically stolen by the cruel hand of the universe. It’s unfair. 

Oftentimes life is simply cruel for no reason, and this he will never understand.

* * *

He’s forgetting Bokuto’s voice. 

He gets this realization in class and the whole world simply crashes around him and he can’t _breathe_ , can’t _think._ The world is falling, and he barely gets himself out the door and into one of the bathroom stalls where he tries to calm himself down. He finds it pathetic how weak a grip he has on his emotions now when he was always the level-headed one; the pensive, taciturn half. It’s just another one of the many manifestations of grief and he absolutely hates it.

Akaashi fumbles with his phone and types in _fukurodani nationals volleyball match_ as best as he can, pressing the first video—a very old one—and gliding a shaky thumb across the screen, trying to find the exact timestamp Bokuto says it—

_“Hey-hey-hey! Akaashi! Did you see that? The awesome cut shot I just did?!”_

He watches his old self mumble something the cameras don’t catch and begins trembling—how could he have forgotten? There’s not a day where Akaashi doesn’t think of him, what they had, and what he cannot get back. Yet he’d failed to recall something so simple as Bokuto’s voice anyways.

Soon he will forget the tiny details of Bokuto’s face, the small scar on his right arm, the sound of Bokuto’s heartbeat against his ear. The thought is unfathomable, and he feels like he’s drowning again, over and over and over, because if he’d managed to forget Bokuto’s voice then he’ll forget all of these, too.

He is alone. Kuroo has Kenma, Tsukki has Yamaguchi, and even Oikawa has Iwaizumi. 

Akaashi—Akaashi has no one. Not anymore.

* * *

It’s just a simple bento box: black plastic on the outside, red on the inside with four compartments of varying sizes. But the mere sight of it is enough to give him whiplash and make him stumble and pause in the middle of their kitchen when it accidentally falls from the cupboard.

_“Are you gonna get tired of me, Akaashi?” Bokuto pouts. “Am I really so predictable?”_

_On days where Bokuto has volleyball training—which is to say, every day—Akaashi makes him lunch. Today is hard boiled eggs, chicken, rice, and a variety of vegetables he’s fitted the best he can in the decently-sized bento box. He’s folding the note he always leaves with the packed lunch when Bokuto asks him this question, sneaking up on him from behind._

Of course _knowing what lunch Bokuto would like today, tomorrow, next week, and even next month would send him into one of his moods._

 _His eyes widen. “Of course not,” Akaashi replies, as if it’s the most preposterous thing in the world. Years and years of knowing Bokuto, learning how to deal with his dejected modes, yet he’d fallen in love with him anyway. To Akaashi falling_ out _of love was impossible._

_“Really?”_

_“Yes.” He kisses Bokuto square on the lips, and Bokuto lifts a hand to grasp Akaashi’s chin with his index and thumb, kissing and staying like that for a while, bento box and note forgotten on the kitchen counter._

_Bokuto perks up after that, dejection automatically forgotten._

Akaashi whips his hand away like the plastic is burning hot and inhales sharply, shaking his head in an attempt to come to. He loses his appetite the entire day.

* * *

A thousand days. This is precisely how much time they spent together not as friends, but as two people so deeply in love with each other.

If he’d known that there would be a limit to it and that he’d have only a thousand days with Bokuto, then he’d have made every moment last; committed to memory even the minutest of details that involve Bokuto Koutarou. Because he will never again see Bokuto; never again hear his voice or touch his hand or feel the heat of his body. He will never again have to deal with one of his dejected modes.

What they had then Akaashi can never get back. _One more day_ , he pleads, _just one_.

One last morning. He’ll never ask for anything else.

* * *

_Maybe you should find another place to stay_ , Kuroo told him.

 _Why?_ , Akaashi replied, but then Kuroo’s phone rang and from a meter away he saw that it was Kenma, and of course Kuroo needed to take it. Upon coming back, he began talking about something else like he never suggested anything at all, and Akaashi pretended he never asked what he asked.

Bokuto lingers in everything, right down to Akaashi’s very being. It’s constricting and suffocating, living in the same apartment and having to relive all the good memories then remembering that he’s _gone_ ; he’ll never come back. Not in three days or a week. Yet Akaashi can’t even fathom moving out, not when the apartment is the last thing truly he has of Bokuto.

That, and the message on his phone that’s remained unopened for months.

* * *

On the thousandth morning, Akaashi had a voicemail waiting for him when he awoke. He’d been fast asleep when someone called, so exhausted from class that he slept through the ringing of the phone on his desk through the night. He was never one to check on his phone first thing in the morning and so it had laid forgotten for quite some time then, and he hadn’t known someone had left him a message while he was asleep.

He’d made his bed and brushed his teeth and made breakfast and turned the TV on before he even thought of looking at his phone. And then, just as he was standing from the dinner table, he heard _it_ on the morning news:

_A freak accident involving the sudden derailment of three train cars on the Zurich-Geneva train line occurred in Switzerland Monday, taking the lives of over fifty, including six Japanese citizens. Bokuto Koutarou, star volleyball player and national team hopeful, was one of the victims in the aforementioned accident._

His blood ran cold and his entire body froze as he stared at the tv, at the photo of Bokuto the news channel had chosen to include in their broadcast. He didn’t think it was real. Just the day before they were texting on the phone and Bokuto kept sending him pictures from Switzerland, from their hotel room to the gymnasium they were training in.

He didn’t think it was real, and yet it was. He’s lived a nightmarish existence ever since.

* * *

In a few months it will have been a year since the accident happened. 

Akaashi is sitting on their bed the morning after the thousandth, the sun’s rays warm on one side of his face and casting a shadow on one side of the room, but he has neither the inclination nor the energy to move away. In his hand is his phone, his thumb hovering just above the _play_ button of the last voicemail he ever received from Bokuto.

He takes a deep breath before he presses it. He’s been staring at it for hours, another sleepless night leaving him tense and restless and desperate to move on.

“ _Akaashi!_ ” Bokuto’s voice booms. _“It’s our last day here and I know it’s late there and I’m sorry I didn’t call but…”_

He starts shaking. The person on the phone sounds so alive and so real Akaashi feels like he’s going crazy. It’s only a minute-and-a-half, his boyfriend’s final message to him, and it’s one of the very few things he has left.

“ _I’m kinda missing you, Akaashi,”_ Bokuto continues, “ _it’s cold sleeping alone. But you know, maybe we can go here once we’re outta university!”_

There are tears on Akaashi’s cheeks now and it hurts to breathe; his vision is blurred such that everything is a vague outline he can hardly make out. He can’t even read Bokuto’s name on the screen of his phone anymore.

 _I miss you,_ Akaashi thinks, I _miss you I miss you I miss you—_

There’s a loud sound in the background that Akaashi assumes is the train arriving. He hears the almost-robotic station announcement not a second later, French first and then English, and Bokuto’s voice turns a tone frantic, and Akaashi knows he’s scared that he might miss the train if he doesn’t return to the rest of his teammates idling on the platform.

“ _I think that’s my train._ ” Akaashi can almost imagine his face as he says it. Maybe if he'd been awake when Bokuto called he could have _—_

“ _I gotta go, Kei. Call you later. See you tomorrow. Love you,_ ” Bokuto utters in a rush of syllables. Then the line cuts off, and everything is silent.

Akaashi is alone, in their room, with sheets that still somehow smell like Bokuto, a dresser only half filled with clothes, and a heart that will never be whole again.

“I love you too, Koutarou.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now. It’s my first Haikyuu!! fic so I hope it’s okay. Quite angsty, I know, and my apologies :’) I may or may not have cried a teeny bit while I was writing this myself.
> 
> I’m on Tumblr @ **[saintarkh](https://saintarkh.tumblr.com/)** :)


End file.
